Do structures have a meaning at all? The common Structuralist approach – to which we adhere – is a clear yes. Structure is meaning. Structure imparts a certain meaning, too – if only in the sense that adherence to a certain, already-known structure shapes readers‘ expectations, and and hence produces meaning.
A chiastic pattern suggests a parallelism of its constituents. „Fair is foul and foul is fair“ demonstrates this in a nutshell by equating two opposed concepts on the lexical („fair IS foul“) as well as the syntactical level. A ring may extend the pattern to the extent that various episodes of a narrative are linked thematically as well as by their place in the narrative.
Even more important is the fact that a Ring Structure turns on itself, creating a closed pattern where the beginning and the end meet, suggesting a return to the initial state.
One may think that in a narrative universe where a Ring Structure is just one of several possible structures, storytellers will employ the form more consciously than their ancient counterparts, when it was the main mode of storytelling. Again, this may give us some clues on the worldview that is transported by the very use of a certain narrative structure.
This post looks into ways of making narrative sense from Ring structures, as well as the underlying worldview.
Every Story Is Over Before It Begins?
In Michael Roemer’s Book Telling Stories. Postmodernism and the Invalidation of Traditional Narrative (London 1995), the author asserts that „every story is over before it begins“. From this Roemer draws a number of conclusions that, while relevant in their own right, would lead too far to dicuss them here. What is central to his argument, however, is that a story is always told from a vantage point OUTSIDE it, in full knowledge of the course of the plot and its outcome.
Roemer does not distinguish between linear and circular story-telling, and his notion of „traditional narrative“ versus Postmodernism seems a bit dated, now that Postmodernism is over and deconstruction is part of the mainstream of American politics. Still, I think it is interesting to apply his notion explicitly to Ring Structures.
Ring structure may well support the view that every story is over before it begins, albeit a different way than Michael Roemer envisages. While every story is over before it begins for its narrator, this is frequently untrue for recipients. In detective fiction we know that a crime will be solved, but we don’t know who committed it until the very end, and only then, „when the story is over“, do we see the clues to its solution. Umberto Eco’s Name Of The Rose plays with these genre expectations by having multiple disconnected murders and a villain that is driven as much by chance as by his own volition.
With a ring composition it seems different. Since it returns to where it started, recipients (readers, listeners) should be aware of the outcome from the very outset. If the stories set up expectations of the hero returning to where he came from, the audience will know that everything will eventually work out fine. Mary Douglas suggests this in her discussion of Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac.
If this is true, a ring composition does presuppose a certain foreclosed worldview, a mythical mindset that may well be at odds with the linear narrative progression that is typical for most modern storytelling.
Framing narratives
Is a ring-structured narrative really ever over? And just as important, does it ever have beginning? A linear narrative needs a frame, a beginning and an end. Both are imposed more or less arbitrarily by the narrator. Iurii Lotman, among others, has argued that a work of art only exists because of its delineation. By framing alone, a certain set of rules is imposed upon the work. A photo is a great example – ostensibly representing a scene from real life, what is left out of its frame is as important as what is actually shown.
A circular narrative, albeit closed in itself, lacks this kind of frame. Of course, there still exist a beginning and an end, but the narrative being a circle, they conincide and form their own frame. This may be the point where the hero embarks from his quest, or the place where the narrative is enacted. In the Gospel of Mark, episodes are frequently framed only by their setting („And then he came to Capernaum…“) What is important is that the frame is not arbitrarily set up by an author, and that what happens beyond the frame is entirely irrelevant to the narrative.
Linear narrative is of course associated with a teleologic worldview where everything moves towards a final goal. In fiction, this may be the denouement of the murder in a detective novel, or the marriage in a love story, In real life, this may be the Second Coming and the Kingdom of God, Communism, or the triumph of free market democracy, whatever.
It folllows that ring-structured narratives should be associated with a different worldview, one that does not move towards some goal, but rather is rooted in seemingly immutable, because prefigured, narratives that are not created by their protagonists who at least think they are free, but merely re-enacted anew by ever-changing agents. (It also follows that there is nothing new under the sun, and that the present inevitably pales when measured against the past.)
A world that tries to make sense of chaotic reality not by lining up events and actions towards their presumed goal, but according to their narrative prefiguration, will therefore rely on these narratives even if current events do not 100 % conform to them. (Haven’t we all neglected those currents that didn’t align with the mainstream liberal narrative of ever-growing freedom and prosperity?)
Ring-structured narratives aren’t ever over
This is different from the pathos of historiography to learn from past events. Instead of using stories of the past as a model for the future, they are used as a model for the present. Here is the point where stories and myths coincide. A myth is regularly re-enacted in ritual to guarantee the ongoing life of the world. In narrative theory, the Monomyth of the hero descending into another realm to bring back some life-giving force lies at the heart of stories from Osiris to Harry Potter. In other cases, stories from the past are used to describe current events, turning the protagonists into a „new [Nero, Herod, insert name here]“ to align their actions with a well-known, and therefore manageable, model. Since these stories can be put to new use and re-enacted by real-life actors again and again, it may be questioned where they are ever over – or whether they are merely re-actualised and acted out over and over again.
Creating meaning from a ring
Ring-structured narratives do not prescribe that the narrative order of events necessarily follows some sort of external order. The ordering of events into a ring structure is itself a creative act. Cornelia Soldat has shown in her 2024 ASEEES paper that one author (Allessandro Guagnini) can actually plagiarise another (Albert Schlichting) and present the same events to a completely different purpose, by arranging them around a different Central Loading that gives meaning to the text as a whole. Schlichting uses much the same episodes to persuade the Pope of Ivan IV’s irreligiosity as Guagnini, who attempts to persuade the Polish King that they are right to restrict the ruler in his power, lest he turns tyrant.
One might finally ask the question whether this is one factor that contributed to establish authorship in the modern sense, not only compiling and reproducing tratiditional texts, but putting one’s own spin on them. Maria Ivanova’s paper in the same panel hints in that direction. A printer using his printer’s marks to single out certain passages in a book that he edits puts his own individuality into others‘ texts to actively engage with both the texts and and the audience. However, this is another topic.
(c) Stephan Küpper 2024